THE LAST OF US Game vs. TV Show | S01E09 - Look for the Light

The words on her tank: Боевая подруга means Fighting Girlfriend [x]

While living in Tomsk, she learned that her husband was killed fighting the forces of Nazi Germany near Kiev in August 1941. The news took two years to reach her. The news angered her extremely, and she became determined to fight the Germans in vengeance for her husband’s death 

Most of the men fighting alongside Mariya just saw her as a publicity stunt and didn’t take her seriously. However, their doubts were quickly laid to rest when Mariya drove her tank straight into battle and was the first tank to breach the German lines. In doing so, she destroyed several machine gun nests and German artillery. It wasn’t long until the Germans figured out that her tank was the one they needed to really worry about.

The Germans immediately started focusing their gunfire on her medium Mariya-Vasilievna-Oktyabrskayasized tank, temporarily crippling it. Mariya didn’t sell all her worldly possessions just so she could sit around in a crippled tank. She was determined to get her vengeance. She leaped out of her tank into a hail of gunfire and started patching it back together so that she could charge even further into the enemy lines.

A month later Mariya found herself in the middle of night raid when her tank was hit by an artillery shell severing the tracks on her tank. She once again jumped out of her tank and started repairing the tracks while her gun crew provided covering fire. A few days later and a little worse for wear, she rejoined the fight.

Mariya Vasilyevna Oktyabrskaya  was the first female tanker to be awarded the Hero Of The Soviet Union award; the Soviet Union’s highest award for bravery during combat.

Sources: [1] [2]

If you wear glasses, you might have noticed that they’ve been getting steadily more expensive in recent years, no matter which brand you buy and no matter where you shop.

That’s because a giant-but-obscure company called Luxottica bought out Sunglass Hut and Lenscrafters, then used their dominance over the retail side of glasses to force virtually every eyewear brand to sell to them (Luxxotica owns or licenses Armani, Brooks Brothers, Burberry, Chanel, Coach, DKNY, Dolce & Gabbana, Michael Kors, Oakley, Oliver Peoples, Persol, Polo Ralph Lauren, Ray-Ban, Tiffany, Valentino, Vogue and Versace); and used that to buy out all the other eyewear retailers of any note (Luxottica owns Pearle Vision, Sears Optical, Sunglass Hut and Target Optical) and then also bought out insurers like Eyemed Vision Care and Essilor, the leading prescription lens/contact lens manufacturer.

Controlling the labs, insurers,  frame makers, and all the major retail outlets has allowed Luxottica to squeeze suppliers – frames are cheaper than ever to make, thanks to monopsony buying power with Prada-grade designer frames costing $15 to manufacture – while raising prices as much as 1000% relative to pre-acquisition pricing.

It’s even worse for lenses: a pair of prescription lenses that cost $1.50 to make sell for $800 in the USA.

LA Times columnist David Lazarus wrote a column about skyrocketing eyewear prices and was approached by Charles Dahan, who once owned one of the largest frames companies in America, Custom Optical, which supplied 20% of the frames sold at Lenscrafters prior to the Luxottica acquisition. Dahan describes how Luxottica cornered the horizontal and vertical markets for eyewear and pushed out or bought out every other company (Oakley refused to sell or lower prices, so Luxottica boycotted it from its retailers, forcing the company into such a precarious position that it Luxottica was able to buy it for a fraction of its peak book-value just a few years later).

This is a good example of how decades of far-right ideologically driven antitrust malpractice has hurt everyone. After all, glasses aren’t just a fashion item: they’re a necessity for people with poor vision, a prerequisite for driving, walking, cycling, reading, getting an education or doing your job.

Luxottica grew through acquisition, by buying up its competition. This was banned under classic antitrust law, until the Reagan years. This pattern has been repeated in many other domains: beer, whiskey, retail pharmacies, and so on. In every one of those domains, we are getting screwed, as are small businesspeople and the families they serve.

“perfect”